Life Book

The lyrical opening was beautiful, and the world intriguing but I almost stopped reading around page 90, it was the kind of story I didn't like, about emotions and relationships and college years and the crowd. I felt stuck in this narrow world, as stuck as the main character unable to see inside of herself or outside. I realise I have very little interest in the grit and grime of the romantic affairs of others, especially people I don't especially like. But suddenly I was deep inside the characters and the science, and I realised that the story is about the bubble, about the ways people cut themselves off from the bigger picture, from the people around them, from their own power and abilities and capacity for love, from the evolutionary possibilities and the blurring and mutabilty of things we take for granted. Gender is, of course, at the forefront in this book, but it seemed to me that it was only one of the certainties that we hold to and that fall away. Anna Senoz has a character, a belief system, a history that I find entirely foreign, and yet I was able to experience with her limits that have never been mine, fears that I do not share, desires and dreams that I have never wanted. To me that is the true power of writing, and this book impressed me. Not least the mastery of the science, the fascinating larger debates that such writing raises about how large philosphical questions are experienced in the way each one of us lives our lives. I appreciated the way this book explored both the superficiality and the depths that such an experience reflects upon the questions through an impossibly real portrait of a family, which was always the emotional center through personal tragedy, science's disgusting sexual politics and the implications for sexuality itself, and breaking through here and there the physical violence, misery and poverty of the world impossible to fully escape.